Published unsigned under the headline “Bonapartean Victims and Tools” in the New-York Daily Tribune, No. 4676, April 14, 1856, p. 4; first published in The People’s Paper, No. 205, April 5, 1856, which is the text followed by MEW (vol. 11, there titled “Das Frankreich Bonapartes des Kleinen”); the text of the Tribune has variants. Attributed to Karl Marx by MEW; MEGA² I/15 not yet published. Text from the original newspaper (Library of Congress, Chronicling America). Traducción al español.
The France of Bonaparte the Little revelling at the birth of a son of a Montijo, lavishing the treasure of a nation on a ludicrous pageantry, “all clinquant, all gold, like heathen gods,” is in terrible contrast with the France tortured at Cayenne, smarting at Lambessa, lingering at Belle-Isle, and rotting in the hulks, with the France starving in the Crimea and the France in France reeling on the brink of bankruptcy. In the letter of M. Tassillier—literally translated from the original, which will be found in another column—the reader will perceive the genuine story of the French citizens transported to Cayenne. The press of true-born British flunkeyism, it is true, trumpets into the ears of the drowsy world, with most hyperbolical flourish, the great news of the boundless magnanimity and superhuman clemency of Louis Bonaparte, proclaiming a general amnesty, and deafening the first cries of his child by the shouts of thousands of Frenchmen restored to their families and to liberty. But, turning away from the paid exultation of the sycophant, let us hearken to the unbribed language of facts. Bonaparte offers to the men he has tortured during four years to tear asunder their chains on the condition of their consenting to brand themselves with indelible infamy, and to pass through the furcæ caudinæ of this new Lower Empire. If they will declare “loyal submission” to the Empire, that is, sanctify the coup d'état and abnegate the Republic, if they will sell their souls he is ready to sell them their bodies. “Long since,” says the Moniteur, “at the inauguration of the Empire this generous appeal was made.” Thus the official journal itself avows that the general amnesty now puffed as a stupendous novelty is but a repetition of a stale farce played off four years ago. The genius of corruption flatters himself that his victims are now brought down to his own level, that they are sufficiently broken to humbly accept as a grace in 1856 what they indignantly resented as an affront in 1852.
Of course, the Moniteur decks its generous appeals to meanness with shrewdly calculated forgeries and falsifications. It pretends that after the events of June, 1848, 14,000 men having been condemned to transportation to Algiers, the clemency of the President left only 306 in Africa. Now, with the same Moniteur in our hand, we assert that of the 14,000 prisoners made in June, 1848, there remained in prison in November, 1848, at the time when the Assemblee Constituante discussed the execution of its decree of transportation, only 1,700; that 1,500 of them were sent to Belle-Isle, and on the 18th March, 1849, under the ministry of F. Barrot, 700 out of these 1,500 were sent to Bona in Africa. It is [th]en this last figure of 700 that the grace of Bonaparte has reduced to 306, and not, as his lying Moniteur has it, the enormous number of 14,000; and that small grace itself was only a trick played off against the Assembly. As to the transported and exiled of December, the same Moniteur computes their number at 11,060, and affirms that this is now reduced to 1,058. Now, the coup d'état made more than 11,000 victims in the four Departments of Hérault, Lower Alps, Var and Nievre alone; and at this very moment, at least 12,000 of its victims remain doomed to transportation or exile. It is notorious that the coup d'état affected nearly 50,000 persons. It should be further remarked that the generous appeal of the Moniteur is exclusively addressed to those transported to Algiers and other foreign possessions, the slightest allusion being avoided to the condemned of Angers, the incarcerated for participation in secret societies, to those thrown into the bagnios by the itinerant courts-martial of 1851, to the prisoners of Belle-Isle, and to the students locked up for hissing a paid whitewasher of Bonapartism. By way of compensation, the Moniteur announces an unsophisticated and unconditional amnesty for poachers, smugglers, forgers, thieves, deserters, convicts, and id genus omne. It is quite in keeping with the character of the new Lower Empire and the precedents of Bonaparte that the birth of his son should prove a holiday for all the lower relations of the father.
From the victims of the coup d'état let us pass to its tools, from the men who opposed it to the slaves that executed it, from the soldiers of liberty to the army of the Crimea. If it is a great historical sign that Bonaparte, in the midst of the fresh delusions of a new-fangled dynasty and the supreme triumph of his admittance into the embalmed air of rancid legitimacy, still wants the acknowledgment of his wretched victims, and therefore hypocritically bids for it. This is a trait of historical irony not less notable that at the very time when the head and the members of the Society of the 10th December are celebrating the success of the coup d'état in pomp and luxury at Paris, the army that imposed this degrading rule on France is expiating its crime in the Crimea by denudation, starvation, agony and death in its most dismal and hideous form.
In the first period of the Oriental campaign, from November, 1854, to March, 1855, the upstart of December was puffed as a second Providence, and in every house was sung the admirable military administration of the empire of all the glories, in contrast to the scandalous sufferings that befel the English army, and the natural results of a superannuated system. But, as in every other feat of the new Lower Empire, what was taken for a substance was but a theatrical phantasmagoria calculated for immediate stage effect. During two years Bonaparte had been exclusively bent on preparing for war. He had strained every nerve of the centralized power of France to provide for the first movements of his army—then the main prop of his usurpation and which had not yet served his turn. Indeed it is not to be wondered at that even the reckless adventurer of Strasburg and Boulogne did not succeed in breaking down that admirable organization of the French army, bequeathed by the first Revolution, during the two first years of his misrule. On the contrary, it is a miracle that he has achieved that point in the first two years of real war. Having lavished more wealth in that short struggle than the great Napoleon in the fifteen years of his warfare, he finds at the beginning of the third year the means of France drained, her military administration broken up, and her army dwindling away from misery. The canker that eats up the French army is the organic principle of his empire—theft and embezzlement. And but two years were wanted to make its work appear on the surface.
The wretched state of the French army in the Crimea was broadly asserted in our columns before the London press dared hint at it. Now it has become a secret running the streets and encumbering the thoroughfares of Europe. For the purpose of this article it will suffice to quote from the last letter of The London Times’ Sevastopol correspondent:
“The French army, however numerous they may show it to be upon paper, is dwindling sadly; scurvy and fever are playing havoc in its ranks. I recently stated its daily loss at 170 men......Now the French themselves admit their daily mortality to be 120 men, and on some days considerably more. The right wing of the army, on the Baidar valley, suffers the most. ...... When the mild weather sets in a great increase of disease is to be anticipated. The sick returns of the French will then become terrible...... The French army is being expended, at least, as rapidly as it was by shell and shot during the severest part of the siege.”
Insufficient shelter, want of covering, and a deficiency of food, principally of wine and vegetables, are declared to be the chief causes of their trials. Having described the rigor of the weather, “tubs of water in the huts having frozen to a depth of three inches,” and the violence of snow storms, “which allowed few huts to remain in which the snow did not make its appearance in quantities,” the correspondent asks what the French must have suffered in tents, not huts carefully prepared, not double tents well dug out, but single and unprotected. He concludes by stating that “it is really painful to meet the French convoys of sick,” and intimates that Marshal Pelissier, not able to mitigate the sufferings of his soldiers, is only anxious to conceal them from the English.
What is to be done with these discontented legions, dying from a wretched commissariat, scandalous neglect, and notoriously organized plunder? Are they to be soothed by recitals of Arabian tales on the King of Algiers’s nativity? or by descriptions of the embroidered and gold-laced uniforms of the cautious hero’s pampered guards? French soldiers, it should be recollected, have no stomachs for undergoing injuries like dull English privates. Proof, if proof be wanted, is shown in the several attempts made in the French army to shoot Pelissier—a fact stated by the Milan Gazette, the Moniteur of Radetzky. Nor must it be imagined that the army of the line in France remains a dull spectator of the Crimean tragedy. The razzias of the Paris police have lately been directed at two barracks situated on the right bank of the Seine. The Zouaves, ordered to Paris to chafe public enthusiasm by their exhibition, are already removed from the capital, they having become suspect. Two other regiments returned from the Crimea have also been banished into the provinces. The antagonism between the guard and the line grows daily more embittered—Bonaparte being, at this very moment, about to create new guard-regiments in sufficient numbers to enable this privileged corps to keep the garrison of Paris exclusive of the regiments of the line. Having bribed the army into antagonism to the country, he is now trying to bribe an army within the army—a rather dangerous experiment.
As for the finances of France, it may suffice to state that when the funds fell some time since, it was confidently expected the conclusion of peace and the birth of another Bonaparte would not fail to send them up. Nor was this event left to chance. Not only did the Government give orders to use freely the money at its disposal for the purchase of public funds, but the Crédit Mobilier and similar institutions of Bonapartist credit were, during two consecutive days, largely employed in buying stock. Notwithstanding all these maneuvres the very news of the “nativity,” instead of causing a rise in the funds made them fall, and they continue to go down. Bonaparte, in great rage, has now prohibited the sale on ‘Change of any but officially-quoted stocks, and has had the principal stock jobbers summoned to the Préfecture de Police.
When the statue of Pallas Athene tumbled down in the Parthenon, the accident was received as a fatal doom to the Republic. Bonaparte’s bust tottering on its pedestal in the temple, where the marketable value of governments is quoted and the people’s history discounted, would seem to presage the downfall of this Empire of Stockjobbing.